Joyce and the Joys of Life as a Writer
I promised on Monday (ish ... the problem with being a bohemian-working-student type is that the standard division between days gets muddled) that you'd have my thoughts on James Joyce's The Dead from Dubliners on Tuesday. I failed to produce such a blog yesterday. Accept my apologies and suggest suitable punishments in the comments, if you please.
I really liked it. We actually got to discuss it in class today, and what I realized will likely make the main difference between Joyce and myself as writers is not that he was writing fiction about his own contemporary society and I'm writing pre-technological fantasy, but that he was absolutely meticulous about every detail (did you read "every"? because I meant it) in his stories. Such that it took him 14 years to finish Ulysses. I couldn't help thinking in class about Patricia Briggs' analogy about short stories and novels as being like figure skating and hockey, the former requiring meticulous attention to detail and every form, the latter being about getting the proverbial puck from one end of the rink to the other, into the net, and having a few good fights along the way. James Joyce seems to have written three twenty-minute periods worth of an olympic technical program. The result is beautiful. Really intriguing stuff, with super interesting characters, and themes, and sentences so well crafted that you cannot tell they were crafted at all because they just flow.
In other literary news, I'm about half way through EM Forester's A Passage to India, and liking it quite well also; really interesting narrator. I'll give a full report at some point ... but I'm not making any promises about when this time.
I've been world building (though not making as many words as I'd like) and so I've been churning my primordial ooze pretty actively. Last night I decided that it was not enough for me to have only uber vague concepts about the math involved in the magic of my world. So I started making graphs and pie charts. Know what I discovered? That I wish I would have made myself take more math classes. I wish that I understood something more about algorithms, and that I knew something about probability.
And do you know what else I've discovered? The computer I do most of my writing on does its weekly virus scan at 3:30am on Wednesdays ... and half an hour from when it politely tells you it's going to begin scanning, it shuts off without further warning. It was time to go to bed anyway, but I had to remind myself rather forcibly that my across-the-hall neighbor is a light sleeper and would have been unimpressed by a 4am temper-tantrum.
I really liked it. We actually got to discuss it in class today, and what I realized will likely make the main difference between Joyce and myself as writers is not that he was writing fiction about his own contemporary society and I'm writing pre-technological fantasy, but that he was absolutely meticulous about every detail (did you read "every"? because I meant it) in his stories. Such that it took him 14 years to finish Ulysses. I couldn't help thinking in class about Patricia Briggs' analogy about short stories and novels as being like figure skating and hockey, the former requiring meticulous attention to detail and every form, the latter being about getting the proverbial puck from one end of the rink to the other, into the net, and having a few good fights along the way. James Joyce seems to have written three twenty-minute periods worth of an olympic technical program. The result is beautiful. Really intriguing stuff, with super interesting characters, and themes, and sentences so well crafted that you cannot tell they were crafted at all because they just flow.
In other literary news, I'm about half way through EM Forester's A Passage to India, and liking it quite well also; really interesting narrator. I'll give a full report at some point ... but I'm not making any promises about when this time.
I've been world building (though not making as many words as I'd like) and so I've been churning my primordial ooze pretty actively. Last night I decided that it was not enough for me to have only uber vague concepts about the math involved in the magic of my world. So I started making graphs and pie charts. Know what I discovered? That I wish I would have made myself take more math classes. I wish that I understood something more about algorithms, and that I knew something about probability.
And do you know what else I've discovered? The computer I do most of my writing on does its weekly virus scan at 3:30am on Wednesdays ... and half an hour from when it politely tells you it's going to begin scanning, it shuts off without further warning. It was time to go to bed anyway, but I had to remind myself rather forcibly that my across-the-hall neighbor is a light sleeper and would have been unimpressed by a 4am temper-tantrum.